A new frailty-based GEE approach of the informatively case K interval-censored failure time data

Abstract

Interval-censored failure time data are commonly encountered in many fields and some methods and models have been proposed for them in the literature. In the real situations, interval censoring is informative. For this problem, we propose a new frailty-based generalized estimating equation (GEE) method of the proportional hazards (PH) model with the informatively case K interval-censored failure time data. In this article, a frailty-based generalized estimating equation is developed that can yield an unbiased estimator of the cumulative hazards function. The observation process of the proposed method does not need a non homogeneous Poisson process used in many existing literatures. The asymptotic properties of the proposed method are established, and an extensive simulation study is conducted to assess the performance of the proposed procedure. In addition, an application to an AIDS clinical trial data set is presented.